Saturday, 1 October 2011

Lupe Fiasco: "Moneyman"

To The September 17 Occupiers

Hey Moneyman the crowd is outside. The past, the future and the now is outside. The teachers and cooks and the drop-outs too. Word on the street is they looking for you…

Hey Moneyman they saying whats the score? And how much blood have you spilled on the butcher shop floor? Those numbers keep running but what they running into? The crowd is outside and they asking of you…

Hey Moneyman Moneyman the mayor's on the phone. He says he wants to know if all those people went home. Those momma's and poppa's and students and cooks. Those teachers and preachers, one second I'll look…

Hey Moneyman Moneyman the tents are still up, the songs are still singing and the coffee's in cups. The nights due to fall and the sun's going down but its still a whole mess of good folks hanging round...

They eyes are wide and their voices are loud. Its white and black and colorless proud. The signs are big and the smiles are bright. By heaven I reckon its gone be one hell of a night!

Hey Moneyman poor Moneyman you should slip out the back. Cuz the forces of greed are under attack. No bombs or bullets or rocks or guns. Just hashtags and voices at the tops of their lungs!

Wednesday, Day 12: New York's financial district Wall Street remains barricaded to the public and tourists alike. Occupy Wall Street has effectively shut down the main strip of the financial district. Zuccotti Park, Manhattan: photo by David Shankbone, 28 September 2011

Wednesday, Day 12: New York's financial district Wall Street remains barricaded to the public and tourists alike. Zuccotti Park, Manhattan: photo by David Shankbone, 28 September 2011

Day 7 of the Occupy Wall Street protest in Manhattan's Zuccotti Park: photo by David Shankbone, 23 September 2011

Day 7 of the Occupy Wall Street protest in Manhattan's Zuccotti Park: photo by David Shankbone, 23 September 2011

Zuni Tikka on Day 8 of the protest event Occupy Wall Street in Zuccotti Park, New York. Wall Street has been barricaded off to the public for over a week: photo by David Shankbone, 24 September 2011

Day 8 of the protest event Occupy Wall Street in Zuccotti Park, New York. Wall Street has been barricaded off to the public for over a week:photo by David Shankbone, 24 September 2011

Day 8 of the protest event Occupy Wall Street in Zuccotti Park, New York. Wall Street has been barricaded off to the public for over a week:photo by David Shankbone, 24 September 2011

Day 9 of the protest event Occupy Wall Street in Zuccotti Park, New York. Wall Street remains closed to the public for over a week:photo by David Shankbone, 25 September 2011

New York subway barrier gate, Day 3 of the protest Occupy Wall Street in Manhattan's Zuccotti Park: photo by David Shankbone, 19 September 2011

Police barricade on Day 3 of the Occupy Wall Street protest in New York: photo by David Shankbone, 19 September 2011

NYPD officers stand at the west end of Wall Street protecting a barrier that denied all access to the financial district, in anticipation of the Occupy Wall Street protest in New York: photo by David Shankbone, 17 September 2011

Protest shuts down Wall Street -- New York Stock Exchange: photo by David Shankbone, 18 September 2011

And the minority rebuttal:New York Mayor and megamillionaire Michael Bloomberg claims the protestors are barking up the wrong money tree. The bankers and brokers, he says, are "struggling to make ends meet... Anything we can do to help the banks... encourage them... is what we need". (September 30 2011)

33 comments:

The penultimate photograph: Is the bull inside the pen going to break down the barriers to meaningful communication and make his spittin' image finally see red enough to give the financial institutions a bloody eye?

In The History of the Corporation (2003), Bruce Brown proposes the medieval Catholic Church as the prototype of the modern corporation.

__

"This was the First Dominion of the Corporation, when the modern corporation was born and first rose to rule human beings.

"In the 700 years after the fall of Rome, the Benedictines and the other religious orders of the Catholic Church acquired the bulk of Europe’s real physical wealth and dominated contemporary human affairs.

"By the end of the 14th century, the great religious corporations of the Catholic Church – and the increasingly bold for-profit pilot fish darting among them – were already employing all the basic practices of the modern corporate world, from leveraged buyouts to golden parachutes.

"Corporate culture was born during the First Dominion too, with what we now see as the corporation’s signature distortion of the footprint humanity manifests in the world. The corporation is the most powerful and plastic conceptual tool ever devised by human beings, but like every powerful tool, it molds the hand that wields it by encouraging certain qualities in cultures where corporations dominate.

"Greed, cruelty, the will to control and own, these are basic human qualities that take on a much larger role in corporation-dominated cultures, simply because the corporation greatly extends human power to carry them out. Many shining human qualities are manifest through corporate power too – e.g., the Jesuits' utopian Reductions in Paraguay – but century after century the board tilts toward control and exploitation because that’s what the corporation does best.

"From the very beginning, when St. Benedict destroyed Apollo’s sacred grove and established the first Benedictine monastery on Monte Cassino, the corporation has been fundamentally antithetical to freedom of thought, personal belief and action. That’s always been an inescapable part of the Faustian bargain that magnified human power. Even St. Francis, possibly the most charismatic CEO the world has ever known, was unable to create a corporation that didn’t amass wealth and power.

"The big difference between the First and Second Dominions of the Corporation is the style of dress the lordly corporations wear. For the first 700 years of modern corporate history, all the great corporations nominally attempted to incorporate one thing: the spirit of God. In fact, many of the privileges that corporations enjoy today were originally bestowed on them because of the godly purpose they purported to serve.

"The Catholic religious orders were never terribly good at incorporating the Christian God, but they were remarkably successful in other areas, notably acquiring wealth, mastering their human attendants, carrying out complex tasks, and perpetuating their own undying, incorporal existence.

"Humanity threw off the yoke of corporate rule during the Age of Revolution, smashing many of the powerful old corporations and asserting the cause of human rights throughout the sphere of European cultural and political influence. The United States had virtually no chartered corporations at the time of Independence and the adoption of the Bill of Rights.

"America proved an exceptionally fruitful ground for the corporation, though. Within 200 years, a slicked-back new breed of American for-profit corporations multiplied until they numbered in the millions and controlled the physical wealth of not just the United States, the wealthiest nation on the globe, but most of the human species.

"Today – during the Second Dominion of the Corporation – our corporate lords make no pretense to serving a higher good. They wear no artfully hung drapery. The great secular corporations of the Second Dominion like Wal-Mart and Microsoft do not strive to incorporate the spirit of God, but rather the spirit of mammon, which is to say unbounded greed and the free-floating will to dominate."

What you've assembled is powerful and more informative than the little news coverage I saw of the events. I really enjoyed Lupe Fiasco's piece, many of the photographs and the Bruce Brown excerpt. But focus and coherence aren't overrated qualities and the protestors and the person who posted the youtube clip can also be said to put themselves on Mayor Bloomberg's level of incoherence and triviality. We already have far too much of him and that and it's undesirable. Assuming any of the pictured protestors vote, I would guess they'll be voting for Obama which, to me, is sad on a number of levels because it makes them seem like the proverbial dogs in the commercial who are satisfied with the dog food and being treated like dogs, while Obama lunches on Dover sole, according to this week's Newsweek. Thank heaven for Steve's cormorants and their great unflappable dignity. Curtis

Yes, Obama's silver spoon has been dribbling on the label a bit more, and a bit more still, of late. All those $30,000 a plate dinners. And yet -- great shape.

Oh well. On the one hand it would be hard to think of any of this that we're seeing in these images as "serious"; obviously it represents an attempt at a cloning of larger more radical actions elsewhere. It's not the bottom end, quite; that remains in the shadows and night doorways, hidden. On the other hand, and yet, and yet... the global protest events that we're seeing, including this one, do have certain things in common.

One is seeing US corporate greed as a major threat to the earth and its several peoples.

It's not so much a political issue, maybe, as a structural one.

From inside the box, how could we know?

But as far as "politics" goes, my sense is that no one wants any more of that, please.

The "cloning of larger more radical actions elsewhere. It's not the bottom end, quite; that remains in the shadows and night doorways, hidden". That's beautifully hoped. Thanks for sharing the Warren information and the dumb Times excerpt. I think that some of Ms. Warren's work was valuable and necessary (we no longer use credit cards, and although we're hardly uneducated, uninformed or underprivileged, it took us a long time to figure out the no-win mechanics of the bank's credit card operations), but I also think: a) creating a giant, massively-funded and staffed government agency to support her initiative was unnecessary and simply a new, unaffordable problem; and b) I fear she's just another phony, highly compensated shill from Harvard (Law School, in this case) who makes her living prescribing solutions for the rest of us that will not affect her own life one whit ever. I'm sorry to be so cynical about this, but I think it's pretty clear that the professors have created more than their fair share of predictable, avoidable problems. Curtis

I think it's very easy to misinterpret and overinterpret Mitt Romney's recent extemporaneous remark, something that would be evident to Prof. Elizabeth Warren, tenured senior executive of The Harvard Corporation. It's also important not to do that. Curtis

Good work, Tom. Interesting how this thing was ignored and ridiculed for days, on all sides. The leftish ridicule is stopping, and the LA Times had a photo on the front page today. WInning isn't always the only thing, contra Lombardi. As one of the characters in Wm Craddock's wonderful old book Be Not Content put it, "My karma's doing." I'm reposting the photo with the sign about corporations won't be people til Tx executes one; I trust you won't mind.

To reverse the Titanic, to swim back up Niagara Falls, to replace the corporations with people, to re-write the DNA, to induce the chimps to be kind to the group next forest over and quit those night ambushes... now just BE NICE!

Events move along always in an indeterminate fashion. All internal news sources are compromised, so it's useful to seek the view from without.

L'Enfant, you have had this going on in your city every day and night. How does "Democracy" look now from Athens?

The more I look at those champagne sippers the more I hallucinate a vision of a young "straight" John Ashbery, just another face on the balcony.

And the clock keeps turning back to that earlier enigma wrapped inside the mystery of a defense budget too big to match the deficit any more, The Fall of Rome.

I am quite sure that Elizabeth Warren, who is paid $400,000 annually for teaching services at The Harvard Corporation (about twice as much as her recent federal position paid), is a person, by the way.

I think that's the largely the point Romney was trying to make (in the inexact manner typical of extemporaneous speech) to the heckler in the crowd at the IowaState Fair, i.e., that we're all in this together, are interconnected, and that we should try to see the forest, trees and landscape clearly and in perspective in order to discuss problems realistically, whether or not you agree with his own particular approach.

As such, it was a perfectly legitimate and typical "retail" politician's statement, which has been misconstrued and overblown for use to support a competing political agenda. This happens all the time in politics, obviously, but it's irritating when better, more relevant evidence could probably be adduced, reducing the likelihood of congnitive dissonance headaches. He wasn't specifically discoursing on corporate or tax law, which tends to lose crowds at state fairs. Curtis

(I'm told I should fess up that my first knowledge of EW came from that Nin Andrews post, but then Nin got the tip on darn good authority, from a Boy Hunter of Mississippi; and Boy Hunters of Mississippi never lie, as far as I know.)

This has been a remarkable two weeks and this is a remarkable post, Tom. I'm too out of it to be cogent, but have been following closely what I can find. Your post underscores something you can hardly find anywhere except the occupy wall street site - the visuals.

We think how little people actually read today. The paltry coverage has been exclusively words and we know how far that kind of thing goes in our culture. These visuals do for this situation what the repression of visuals of our returning dead from our now decades old wars did not do.

Brought it home viscerally, which for the human animal is one of the only ways we are truly shaken.

Of course I think of our shared history, the assassinations, the Freedom March, the fire hoses and the dogs, the naked child on fire covered in napalm, the general blowing a man's brains out, all live, all visual, all on tv and in the media. Even as this latest round of protests gains a bit of traction, the visuals are still repressed.

The control over us is total. We are at a turning point. I pray these people in the streets remain safe. I fear for them mightily.

i think most of those kids voted for obama. i know i did. i'm ashamed that i caught the hope fever, but shit - what else is youth but naive hope. i think these kids are smarter than we think, they've figured out a thing or two about the hope that comes from out of the tv or iphone or whatever. i'm not an intellect. i mean i thirst for knowledge but i don't have much of it. i will never make 400,000 dollars a year. and if i did i would redistribute to all of all my family but more my friends, who struggle so. the struggle. why does it still exist when these fucks rake in and take in and here me and my piss target breed well, yeah we just breed. when my son grows out of clothes i give them to a friend who has need. i do not waste or at least i am painfully aware when i do. i do not buy clothes or shoes unless from thrift or goodwill and that isn't out of necessity. i have enough money to flush down the toilet for some brand new nikes. but fuck that.i have teeth rotting out of the back of my head. i could have an infection in my brain right now waiting to kill me. dunno. i have heath insurance but apparently health is separate from teeth. i have worked since i was fourteen. i'm 32 and am so thankful that i have a job where i can sit on my ass and push paper and fuck off reading poetry on the internet. but i am walking a thin line, a thin line that will most likely find me as a walmart greeter when i'm 75, trying to pay for my meds. that's if i'm still lucky...as it is now, i could be dead real quick from something totally manageable but i don't even have a way to find out $$$ and i don't have the money to fix it if i knew. i have a nine year old that needs me to go to work everyday to make sure that i have a roof over his head and food in his belly and i don't believe that i have ever so much as hoped that he will someday go to college. worker bees are born but we don't require much cultivation.for as many folks as i know who are making out okay right now i know double that are on the brink of despair and even as i think of those poor people here close to me i think of africa. i think of haiti. i think of just about everywhere the u.s. has invaded and destroyed. who the fuck am i to whine about what i don't have...what kind of evolution is this..that the rich can disconnect and live so extravagantly, and not give it all away give it all back. no one needs 400,000 dollars annually to be happy, to thrive, to survive. dog as my witness, i will never have so much and watch others quietly suffer alive to die.

Gamefaced’s words moved me and shifted a few things around in my brain.

I was somewhat surprised, however, to learn that Prof. Elizabeth Warren’s $400,000 Harvard Corporation salary (plus who knows what extras in terms of Harvard emoluments, speaking fees, etc.) came as a surprise to anyone. I tend to follow these things and am sorry to inform you that, as an academic, she is a relative piker by “permanent government” employee standards. Her erstwhile administration colleague, Prof. Austan Goolsbee of the University of Chicago Business School (one of the chief architects of our ruined economy) recently left Washington, supposedly to ensure retention of his tenure at UC, returning to straight annual salary of more than $600,000 at that institution. (And you wonder why the cost of college has risen so precipitously.)

Goolsbee is a small fish also. Years ago, during the Obama candidacy, the Washington Post ran a flattering profile of Rahm Emanuel, a person who actually sent dead animals through the mail to political opponents as a “joke”and bragged about it, which informed readers that he needed to leave his job in the Clinton White House before the end of that president’s second term in order to “make money for his family” to ensure that he had the wherewithal eventually to return to public service. After 18 months working at a presumably “entry-level” investment banker job at Goldman Sachs in Chicago (I presume this because Emanuel isn’t a banker by training or previous experience), he made $18 million. The WaPo article didn’t bat the proverbial eyelash about this and went on to outline Emanuel’s passionate views on things and his (this was my conclusion) disgusting eating habits. (The interview took place in a Chicago deli frequented by pols.)

The list of relevant examples goes on and I could easily make this bipartisan to include (on relative piker level for a start) a Republican college classmate of mine who now heads the World Bank. During his “power out years”, i.e., during the Clinton administration, he served as General Counsel at Fannie Mae. Gretchen Morgenson’s recent Reckless Endangerment book outlines my classmate’s successful efforts (several years ahead of its and our predictable, collective crash) to secure executive salaries and bonuses totaling many, many millions of dollars for himself, his boss and many other well-known Washington insiders who all “failed up” after their tenure at that disastrous “public—private” entity.

For a long time (and increasingly) , we’ve been governed by people who live in a completely different universe of numbers and values than we do, people who, like Elizabeth Warren, design lives for the rest of us that bear no relation whatsoever to the lives they themselves lead. As I said previously, I think some of Ms. Warren’s work inside government (where, incidentally, she or those working for her initially circulated false information about her salary, stating that it was 1/3 of its actual $193,000 total, a cut from her Harvard Corporation graft, but it was only a temporary position, after all) was valuable. However, I really question the need to set up an enormous, freestanding new government agency dedicated to the purpose of getting consumers to read the small print. There are undoubtedly more cost-effective ways of accomplishing this. Please note also that Ms. Warren’s husband is a tenured Harvard Law School professor, who is senior to her in experience and presumably paid more than she is. Being preached to in the press and on tv in a school-marmish manner by this hypocrite really rankles, but then again, it all does.

I sincerely apologize for taking up so much time and space, especially on small fry like these. If you examine the post-presidential incomes of our chief executives beginning with Gerald Ford, you become very ill very quickly.

As Delroy Wilson memorably said, Better Must Come. DO NOT GET ME STARTED ON BOB RUBIN.

David Shankbone mingled in with these protestors from the first. His photos do indeed have that feel of authenticity we recall from the best work of photographers like Tim Page, from "our" epoch, in picturing the agony of Viet Nam from within.

And this is too, too true:

"The control over us is total. We are at a turning point. I pray these people in the streets remain safe. I fear for them mightily."

One wishes for their safety at the same time one wishes them courage. To be young enough to act is a blessing.

I know nothing at all about Zuni Tikka apart from the reported information that she is 37 years of age and a private citizen. I admire her tenacity in enduring snickering media ridicule. Her objective is plain enough, to turn the prurient hostile gaze back upon itself, and to thus call attention in an immediate and dramatic way to the protest against this capitalist form of society.

I don't think the struggle is about winning anything. The battle is unwinnable.

Wall Street always wins, even when the country loses.

gamefaced, loud and clear.

"...but i am walking a thin line, a thin line..."

These are the stories the champagne drinkers on the balcony will never wish to hear, much less understand.

Darn, it must be swell to have teeth.

But "seriously..."

Who escapes these fates? The very, very few...

Our own old-folks struggles here with those charming monster corporate zombie "persons" -- e.g. megadeath insurance inc., aka the good gals and guys of van guys -- have been jolly scenes from the out-takes of Dusk Until Dawn.

(I mean, okay, Mitt, if a person can be a demon, the corporations may indeed be persons, as you submit.)

Where is Sepia Pond, and why does the canoe have a leak in it, or is it actually a lifeboat, and who is gnawing on our appendages now?

The York Times is a person is a corporation, Harvard is a person is a corporation, Elizabeth Warren is... what... a lawyer?

Sometimes I think all lawyers, like all writers, are characters out of the fabled paradox of Epimenides.

Epimenides the Cretan said, "All Cretans are liars." If he told the truth, then his statement is a lie, and so he didn't tell the truth; if he lied, then his statement is true, but he did not lie. In logical terms the statement is a perfect self-contradiction, a perfect equivocation. (A lawyer's trick, obviously.)

As for Warren's actual statements of policy, I must admit that, while not forgetting talk is cheap, I do like some of the common-sense things she has to say, just as I liked a lot of what Obama had to say, back then... in the garden.

Simon, I'm enjoying that bit of phantasy historical photoshopping more and more, the longer I linger over it...

Tom, courage, yes, be brave, be safe. Thank you very much for the Guardian links. Better than anything I've seen here except on the Occupy site itself. I've passed them on.These folks are in our hearts and in our minds. Don

Retrospective apologies in order: I have just now been signaled by our helpful lab pixies that a comment from few days ago has been lingering in Spam Limbo -- from which I have now liberated and restored it. That wasn't censorship, that was just the hiccoughing pixies. No manners whatsoever.

is there art in mob beyondemotion....I wonder about the wisdom of theunions once so necessary...the stupidity of management andthe unions and the American consummer sank General Motorsleading me among obvious publicstupidities to look up the pleuralof dufus...was it dufasi...no it'sdufuses...the gas guzzlers and the"job bank" and Barney Frank, Rains,Clinton, Bush....home ownership...loaning money to people who couldn'tpossibly pay it back...through thetax supported Fannie Mae...and thenTARP that allowed huge $$ to idiotbankers who gambled on the taxpayerdime....the people I know who workin factories, farms, chicken plantsand timber...would want to kill thepeople on wall street if they couldsee how they lived.......howeverviolence is not what we need...there still remains goodwill andcreativity throughout the countryall we need to do is tap it...theAmerican people were not happy about bailing out the auto industrythey did however because they feltwe needed an American auto industry

Work when you can, claw your wayup, live modestly and perhaps buyAmerican...

I believe fasting and prayer onWall st. and the Brooklyn Bridgemight have done more to have movedthe fools in government, thecaptains of money...and yesentrepreneurs like the late SteveJobs

psthe last poet to have a bigplan to order the world in a bigway was Allen Ginsberg...and TC,the great, had contemporary opinionson thatas described "In the Great NaropaPoetry Wars" now a rarity thatI paid $75 bucks for, and lovedreading, as it stood up forindividual integrity apart froma grand plan that was supposed tosupercede existing culture andpolitics...helping people to seenow I'll buy that